1 SOCIOLINGUISTIC ANXIETIES

In 2023, I was invited to give a talk on the resurgence of deficit thinking in England's schools, and how contemporary education policies reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies which frame the language practices of working-class and racialised children as suffering from debilitating absences. After my talk, a White male professor commented that this was more about class than race, and that sociolinguistic scholarship focusing on race risked downplaying the struggles of the White working class. I have witnessed the same anxieties unfold in the peer review system, where UK sociolinguists seem uneasy about scholarship which centres race and colonialism, despite the colonial logics which lie at the core of the discipline (Heller & McElhinny, 2022). This is especially concerning given that sociolinguistics emerged simultaneously with the anti-colonial organising of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s, representing community activism which included exposing systemic anti-Black language policing in schools.

In their leading piece, Flores and Rosa articulate how a raciolinguistic perspective invites us to interrogate the colonial roots of sociolinguistics and how issues of race, colonialism and White supremacy have been pushed to its disciplinary margins. A raciolinguistic perspective seeks to undo taken-for-granted assumptions about language, race and class to interrogate how British colonial logics continue to shape modern society. This intersectional approach has been fundamental to the emergence of a raciolinguistic perspective from the United Kingdom which has examined the mutually constitutive nature of race, class and language in different contexts including schools (Cushing, 2022; Cushing & Snell, 2023; Li Wei & García, 2022), the UK citizenship process (Khan, 2021), speech and language pathology (Farah, f.c.), and urban areas with high South Asian populations (Sharma, 2016; see also Harris, 2006). This builds on a long history of work produced by racially marginalised scholars who exposed how colonial and White supremacist logics delegitimised the language practices of racialised communities in mid-20th-century England (e.g. Coard, 1971; Singh, 1988). Yet, these names are typically erased out of historical accounts of UK sociolinguistics (see Gilmour, 2020 for one exception) in much the same ways that colonialism and anti-Blackness are often overlooked in projects on so-called Multicultural London English. The need for UK sociolinguists to pay attention to coloniality is ever more urgent given energised attempts by the state to deny the existence of institutional racism, censor anti-colonial efforts in schools and universities and project images of White, working-class children as victims of ethnic diversity (Shafi & Nagdee, 2022). As Flores and Rosa argue, sociolinguists have an important role to play in uncovering how perceptions of language are central to the specific articulations of racism in the modern-day United Kingdom, urging us all to de-universalise ways of being and knowing which are rooted in notions of idealised Whiteness and have long shaped sociolinguistic scholarship.

中文翻译：

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英国的种族语言学视角

1 社会语言焦虑

2023 年，我受邀就英格兰学校中赤字思维的死灰复燃，以及当代教育政策如何再现种族语言主义意识形态进行演讲，这些意识形态将工人阶级和种族化儿童的语言实践视为因缺勤而遭受衰弱之苦。在我的演讲结束后，一位白人男性教授评论说，这更多地是关于阶级而不是种族，而专注于种族的社会语言学学术有可能淡化白人工人阶级的斗争。我在同行评审系统中目睹了同样的焦虑，英国社会语言学家似乎对以种族和殖民主义为中心的学术感到不安，尽管殖民逻辑是该学科的核心（Heller & McElhinny，2022 ）。鉴于社会语言学与 20 世纪 60 年代黑人权力运动的反殖民组织同时出现，这一点尤其令人担忧，代表了社区激进主义，其中包括揭露学校系统性的反黑人语言管制。

弗洛雷斯和罗莎在他们的主要文章中阐明了种族语言学的观点如何邀请我们质疑社会语言学的殖民根源，以及种族、殖民主义和白人至上问题如何被推到学科边缘。种族主义语言学的视角试图推翻关于语言、种族和阶级的理所当然的假设，以质疑英国殖民逻辑如何继续塑造现代社会。这种交叉方法对于英国种族主义语言学观点的出现至关重要，该观点研究了包括学校在内的不同背景下种族、阶级和语言的相互构成性质（Cushing，2022；Cushing & Snell，2023；Li Wei & García） ，2022）、英国公民身份进程（Khan，2021）、言语和语言病理学（Farah，fc .）以及南亚人口较多的城市地区（Sharma，2016；另参见 Harris，2006）。这是建立在种族边缘化学者的长期研究基础上的，这些学者揭露了殖民主义和白人至上主义逻辑如何使 20 世纪中叶英国种族化社区的语言实践失去合法性（例如 Coard，1971；Singh ， 1988 ）。然而，这些名字通常会从英国社会语言学的历史记录中被抹去（一个例外见 Gilmour，2020），就像殖民主义和反黑人在所谓的多元文化伦敦英语项目中经常被忽视一样。鉴于国家极力否认制度性种族主义的存在、审查中小学和大学的反殖民努力，并将白人工人阶级儿童塑造为种族主义受害者的形象，英国社会语言学家需要更加迫切地关注殖民性。种族多样性（Shafi & Nagdee，2022）。正如弗洛雷斯和罗莎所说，社会语言学家在揭示语言认知如何成为当今英国种族主义具体表述的核心方面发挥着重要作用，敦促我们所有人去普遍化根深蒂固的存在和认识方式理想化白人的概念，并长期以来塑造了社会语言学学术。